Work History Collage

Purpose:
The work collage may serve several purposes at once. It can be an icebreaker at the beginning of the school year. It can provide the teacher an understanding of the students’ funds of knowledge through learning about the various occupations their families engage in. It can help students to get to know each other and to respect diversity. Finally, the work collage may serve as an informal introduction to the course content and make it personally relevant for the students.

Procedure:
Teacher provides a large number of a variety of magazines and newspapers with photographs and illustrations, enough glue sticks, markers and scissors for the students to share, and a piece of colored construction paper for each student. The teacher asks the students to put their names on the construction paper and to make a collage about occupations/jobs in their immediate or extended family from the magazines provided. This should be information that they are willing to share.
Each student will then post/tape their collage on the classroom walls or board. Everyone will have an opportunity to walk around and look at the collages.
Teacher will then break the classroom into small groups. The task of each group is to discuss what they understand the course content to be (e.g. science, mathematics, language arts) and come up with three examples of an occupation observed in the collages to show how what course covers may apply to real life. In the discussion, the students must refer to the authors of the collages and to each other by name.